Reaction: The End of MPLS?

Jason Wells, over on LinkedIn, has an article up about the end of MPLS; to wit—

MPLS, according to Akkiraju, is old-hat and inefficient – why should a branch office backhaul to get their cloud data, when Internet connections might be faster – and 100X cheaper? Cisco, in acquiring Viptela, has brought Akkiraju, his company, and his perspective back into the fold, perhaps heralding the beginning of the end of Cisco’s MPLS-based offerings (or at least the beginning of the end of the mindset that they should still have an MPLS-based offering).

To being—I actually work with Aryaka on occasion, and within the larger SD-WAN world more often (I am a member of the TAB over at Velocloud, for instance). This is decidedly not a post about the usefulness or future of SD-WAN solutions (though I do have opinions there, as you might have guessed). Rather, what I want to point out is that we, in the networking industry, tend to be rather sloppy about our language in ways that are not helpful.

To understand, it is useful to back up a few years and consider other technologies where our terms have become confused, and how it has impacted our Continue reading

Worth Reading: The blue disco ball

We deal with procurement departments every day. It’s a fact of modern day corporate life. But this week, I’ve had to respond to so many RFPs asking for “blue disco balls,” (my metaphoric name for a specific kind of middle management error that most vendors, suppliers and even solutions providers love most), I’m thinking about hanging one over my desk. What is a “blue disco ball?” Here’s a story I wrote last year about every senior executive’s worst nightmare and every vendor’s holiday bonus all rolled into a budget-busting good time. —Shelly Palmer

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Worth Reading: High performance computing poised for change

There is a lot of change coming down the pike in the high performance computing arena, but it has not happened as yet and that is reflected in the current Top 500 rankings of supercomputers in the world. But the June 2017 list gives us a glimpse into the future, which we think will be as diverse and contentious from an architectural standpoint as in the past. —The Next Platform

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On the ‘net: Interview on my network career

I was recently interviewed for a new network career site—

I started out building small networks on a lot of different technologies in the USAF, primarily Banyan Vines and Novell Netware, over Token Bus, Thicknet, and other technologies. We implemented a fiber backbone, and I helped replace the old physical switch telephone system main frame with a modern (at that time) SS7 based design. After this, I worked for a small Value Added Reseller around New York City, and then the ASME as a network administrator, then at BASF in the Advanced Technology Group. At this point my wife and I moved to Raleigh, and I started at Cisco TAC in the hardware team. From there I moved to the Routing Protocols team, then Global Escalation, and then into engineering in various roles around Cisco IOS Software and XR. After Cisco, I moved to Verisign Labs, where I primarily focused on security in a more research oriented role, then to Ericsson, working on IPOS, and now LinkedIn.

This looks like a great resource, worth following.

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Worth Reading: What if we designed differently?

Imagine if the design of your electrical supply was optimised to apply the biggest possible voltage and current to anything that was plugged in. That would clearly be ridiculous! Imagine if the design of your kitchen tap was optimised to deliver as much water as possible at the highest possible pressure the moment you turned it on. That would clearly be ridiculous! Imagine if the design of your gas cooker was optimised to burn everything to a crisp as fast as possible in a white hot inferno. That would clearly be ridiculous! So, why have we optimised broadband to deliver as much bandwidth as possible? That’s clearly ridiculous! —CircleID

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Worth Reading: A different kind of bubble

If you visit San Francisco, you will find it difficult to walk more than a few blocks in central S.F. without encountering a major construction project. It seems that every decrepit low-rise building in the city has been razed and is being replaced with a gleaming new residential tower. Parking lots have been ripped up and are now sprouting condos and luxury rental flats. This boom is not overly surprising, given the centrality of San Francisco and the S.F. Bay Area in the Hipster-Techie Mental Map which I have sketched here for those who may still suffer from delusions that Washington D.C. and New York matter–(hint: they don’t.) —of two minds

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Disaggregated, Hyperconverged, and Composed (part 2)

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Worth Reading: A lesson on cloud agility

As first reported by CNBC on Wednesday, retail and e-commerce giant Wal-Mart notified some of its technology partners that they need to move their information assets away from Amazon Web Services if they want to continue doing business. This move certainly comes as no surprise to many, as the two companies are long-standing rivals in their respective quests to dominate the world of retail. It comes just days after the company’s CEO, Doug McMillon, told his company’s annual associates’ meeting, “Looking ahead, we will compete with technology, but win with people. We will be people-led and tech-empowered.” —The New Stack

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Worth Reading: The root of a robust Internet

On 26 December 2006, a magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck off the southwest coast of Taiwan. This was the Hengchun earthquake, and the quake and its aftershocks resulted in six of the seven submarine cables serving Hong Kong being cut, severely disrupting Internet services on the Special Administrative Region. PCCW, the largest Internet operator in Hong Kong, reported a reduction of 50% in data capacity, neighbouring Taiwan had a 100% outage to Hong Kong and South-East Asia, while China’s two main operators reported over 90% outages. —APNIC

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Mickey Rope

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Worth Reading: The revival of standards

Standards… what a boring, old fashioned and backwards oriented term. How can the representative of a vendor that claims to be open, elastic and forward thinking use it in a headline? Be honest… this was one of the thoughts that ran through your mind while reading the title. Now relax and sit back, the following blog might surprise you. — ECI

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Worth Reading: Token Effects

Tokens are a new business model that’s emerging for open source. It’s a new way to raise capital by selling tokens through an ICO (initial coin offering). If the project succeeds, its token will appreciate in value, giving early adopters a nice return. … The token is a cryptocurrency that is used to both improve the product and compensate all participants in the network. —Free Code Camp

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Worth Reading: Four lessons in multicloud storage

Multicloud deployments are a major IT focus, with a whopping 85 percent of enterprises reporting that they have a multicloud strategy in 2017. That’s up from 82 percent in 2016 (RightScale 2017 State of the Cloud Report, February 2017). A big difficulty in pursuing a multicloud strategy is the complexity of managing different storage implementations, each with its own features, user interface, access methods and terminology. If that storage requires proprietary formats or protocols that are rare or unavailable elsewhere, the challenge increases. —Data Center Journal

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Worth Reading: Software is the future of optical

Flexible optical technologies like ROADMs, tunable wavelengths, and the newly enabled tunable modulation format high-speed optics along with sub-wavelength grooming via OTN (which is included in the transport SDN model) are just the beginning. As vendors allow more flexibility in their products, expect software developers to come up with even more ways to use the network as a platform for new services and new capabilities. —ECI

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Open Source Routing at NANOG

If you want to find out more about open source and disaggregated routing for large scale network design, take a look at the recent webinar on this topic over at ipspace.net.

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Worth Reading: The coming war against advertising pollution

Next year, will see a major offensive from Google and Apple against the worse parts of the advertising world. It will be tricky for Google, bound to appear as judge and jury. Expect many casualties. But the entire ecosystem will benefit from these initiatives.To put it bluntly, the ad community has less than a year to clean up its mess before browsers take matters in their own hands. —Monday Note

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Worth Reading: Open IPv6 Resolvers

Open DNS resolvers that answer queries coming from anyone have been the main component of a large number of DDoS attacks in recent years. By sending queries with a spoofed source address to such open resolvers, the resolver will send the answers to that spoofed address. An attacker spoofs the address of his/her target and sends a large number of queries to an open resolver, creating a deluge of large DNS answers towards the target. —APNIC

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On the ‘web: A new way to deal with DDoS

Most large scale providers manage Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks by spreading the attack over as many servers as possible, and simply “eating” the traffic. This traffic spreading routine is normally accomplished using Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) communities and selective advertisement of reachable destinations, combined with the use of anycast to regionalize and manage load sharing on inbound network paths. But what about the smaller operator, who may only have two or three entry points, and does not have a large number of servers, or a large aggregate edge bandwidth, to react to DDoS attacks?

I write for ECI about once a month; this month I explain DOTS over there. What to know what DOTS is? Then you need to click on the link above and read the story.

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Worth Reading: Connecting Sleep and Income

A third of American workers report they regularly get fewer than seven hours of sleep a night, leading to the loss of some 1.2 million working days and robbing the U.S. economy of an estimated $226 billion annually, according to a 2016 study by Rand Europe. And 65% of Americans are losing sleep because of money, according to a recent CreditCards.com report. That’s the big picture. —Market Watch

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Worth Reading: Distributed Memory Pooling

More databases and data stores and the applications that run atop them are moving to in-memory processing, and sometimes the memory capacity in a single big iron NUMA server isn’t enough and the latencies across a cluster of smaller nodes are too high for decent performance. —The Next Platform

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